According to Minister of the Interior Víto Rakušan (STAN), one of the investigative versions in connection with the threats to schools this week is the option that the attack is part of a hybrid action from Russia or another country. The minister told ČTK on Friday. Several hundred schools in the Czech Republic have received threatening e-mails every day since Tuesday, the police consider the severity of the threat to be very low. Schools in Slovakia face a similar problem.
“The intensity of the attack, the coordination, the fact that it is an international attack, the fact that it concerns a certain spectrum of countries, it certainly gives me the impression of a highly coordinated action,” said the Minister of the Interior.
According to him, the difference is also that when a school student threatens, for example, he is usually tracked down very quickly. “Here it turns out that even the process of exact tracing is significantly more difficult, so this indicates a relatively well-thought-out, sophisticated, coordinated approach,” he added.
Due to the threats, a working group was formed on Wednesday, in which representatives of the Ministries of Education, the Interior, the Police and the Commissioner for Human Rights are supposed to solve the current problems of schools and pupils. According to the Austrian, the group met for the first time on Wednesday, and on Thursday they were creating a manual for schools on how to behave in the situation. It was supposed to be sent out on Friday.
According to the Austrian, the manual describes how to communicate with the police, as well as instructions on how to talk to children about threats. “We are also trying to help the educational public how to talk to children about this so that fear does not take root in them,” he said.
The working group works online, if necessary, according to the Austrian, it would meet at the Ministry of the Interior. “Online works in real time, it shares information. New threats are being assessed,” he said. According to him, if it were found that the relevance of the threat is increasing, the group will come up with new procedures.
Threatening emails four days in a row
We previously reported that on Friday, a threatening e-mail, similar to those from the past few days, arrived at several hundred schools throughout the Czech Republic. The police informed about it on the X network, where they also called on people not to publicly share the threats and not to spread them further.
“We do not consider the perpetrator’s threats to be relevant, and we see that his main motivation is public/media interest and sowing chaos. Let’s try together not to play this game today and not to publicly share and spread threats. Minimal public interest is exactly what the writer does not want,” the police wrote.
According to Minister of the Interior Vít Rakušan (STAN), the police are working with a larger number of investigative versions in connection with threats to schools in recent days. He also exchanges knowledge with Slovak colleagues who have faced a similar problem.
1/2 Even today, a threatening email with the same characters as those from the previous days arrived at about 500 schools. Again, we prefer minimalist measures without ordered evacuations, and we will look for an individual and at the same time least invasive solution for site inspections with the schools.
— Police of the Czech Republic (@PolicieCZ) September 6, 2024
A wave of emails on Tuesday contained threats that schools had been mined, prompting an immediate response from security forces. Because of this, some schools in Prague ended classes earlier, others moved activities outside the school building.
On Wednesday, some schools received another email, this time with an explosion threat. Despite the fact that the police do not take the threats as relevant, they say that they are not underestimating the situation, which is unprecedented.
The Austrian described the events of the last few days as an obviously targeted attack and told the media that he considers it all the more insidious because it targets schools and at the same time is timed for the sensitive period of the beginning of the school year.
